At six in the evening last Sunday, the champagne corks were popping in Brussels. Norbert Hofer, the candidate of the far-Right Freedom Party, had just conceded defeat in the Austrian presidential election.

By ten o’clock, however, the bubbles were going flat. The exit polls showed that in Italy, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi was going down to a heavy defeat in the referendum he had called and championed on constitutional change.

Together, these two results revealed a critically important truth about the rise of populism in Europe and its relationship to its troubled economic model.